Documenting the Odyssey

Focusing on one ethnic group's U.S. climb from persecution to
prominence, a film by two more-recent immigrants reveals struggles
and paradoxes of newcomers everywhere.

Perhaps only an immigrant can give full voice to what other
immigrants have experienced - even if the immigrant is from India
by way of Ethopia and her tale concerns Italians who came in waves
to America after 1880.

Suma Kurien, who in 2001 founded LaGuardia Community College's
Center for Immigrant Education and Training, teamed up with her
Italian-born husband, film director Gianfranco Norelli, to make an
award-winning documentary, "Pane Amaro" (Bitter Bread). It is
believed to be the first comprehensive depiction on film of the
early Italian-American experience. "Pane Amaro" premiered in 2007
in Italy, as anti-immigrant sentiment heated up there over an
influx of often illegal newcomers, mainly from North Africa and
Eastern Europe. An English-language DVD was released in spring
2009.

Kurien, the film's co-writer and co-producer, approached the
project with a broad perspective drawn from years of working with
the ethnically diverse Queens community. She founded the center at
LaGuardia to provide comprehensive educational services to help
low-income immigrants become fuller participants in the city's
economic and social life. Funded with city, state, federal and
private funds, it now serves about 600 people a year.

"Many immigrants have to overcome multiple barriers in order to
become part of the society," she said. "It's an attempt to make
that process smoother for themselves and their families. I came as
a more privileged immigrant, knowing English and the culture." She
learned English from her parents, who taught in India and Ethopia.
After immigrating in 1978, she earned an Ed.D. in curriculum and
teaching at Columbia University Teacher's College and got her first
job in the United States as an English as a second language
instructor at LaGuardia.

Her husband suggested doing the film to highlight the parallels
between the plights of 19th century Italian immigrants in the
United States and the hostility with which Italy has greeted recent
immigrants. "There is language in the newspapers that is
disturbing," said Norelli. "There are people who say racist things
that go unchallenged."

A noted producer of documentaries for American and European
television networks who emigrated from Rome in 1979, Norelli made a
proposal to RAI, Italy's national television network. The result
was this 103-minute documentary. "We thought it was ironic," said
Kurien, "that Italians who traveled to other parts of the world to
make a living would find it hard to accept immigrants in their own
midst." Italians - many fleeing extreme poverty - started coming
to the U.S. in the 1880s in large numbers.

After the Civil War, Southern companies recruited Sicilians to
replace formerly enslaved African-Americans on sugar and cotton
plantations. In 1910, Booker T. Washington, the famed
African-American leader, humanist and former slave, traveled to the
south of Italy to encounter child slavery in Sicily. He witnessed a
people "so wretchedly poor in everything else, they are
nevertheless unusually rich in children. . . ." Healthy young males
were especially valued by the Sicilian mining industry and
routinely traded for cash. "From this slavery there is no hope of
freedom," wrote Washington. "Neither the parents nor the child will
ever have sufficient money to repay the original loan. Strange and
terrible stories are told about the way in which these boy slaves
have been treated by their masters…one sees processions of
half-naked boys, their bodies bowed under the heavy weight of the
loads they carried, groaning and cursing as they made their way up
out of the hot and sulphurous holes in the earth."

Kurien and Norelli conducted four years of research in the United
States and Italy. "We proposed [the film] to counter the
stereotypes and the oversimplification that the Italians who came
here had an easy life and that Americans welcomed them with open
arms," said Norelli. They pieced together personal accounts by
community members, commentary by scholars, and historical
photographs and footage. It traces the history of Italians in the
U.S from 1880 to 1950, "from being outsiders and unwanted to
becoming part of the American society with political and economic
power," Kurien said.

Norelli - a political science graduate of the University of Rome
who came to New York on a scholarship to study journalism and
film-making at New York University, said "Pane Amaro" "brings to
life pivotal events," including the mass lynching of 11 Italian
immigrants in New Orleans in 1891. Nine had been tried and
acquitted for lack of evidence in the murder of a police officer
who was investigating organized crime. Ten thousand residents
mobbed a prison where they were held, killing all of the Italian
inmates, shooting nine and hanging two.

The documentary also depicts events like the growth of Italian
Harlem, the largest Little Italy in North America; the settlement
houses and the process of Americanization; the 1911 Triangle
Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, in which dozens of
Italian women were among the 146 workers who died; the role of
Italian-American workers in the American labor movement; and
internment of Italian-American civilians who were declared "enemy
aliens" during World War II.

"We talk about political involvement, fighting for better working
conditions, the anarchists and also terrorists," Kurien said. "The
goal was a nuanced picture of the history, not simply a celebratory
one."

The film also features the rise of Italian-American leaders, among
them three-term Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia (1934-1945), of Italian
and Jewish heritage, after whom the community college and the
airport are named.

While RAI funded the Italian version of the documentary, Italy's
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Italian American
Foundation contributed to make the English-language version for use
in American schools. "People from other immigrant origins talk to
us about how relevant it is to them," said Norelli. "Many
professors want to incorporate it in their curriculum." Kurien and
Norelli are screening the film at colleges in the U.S. and Canada,
and for Italian-American organizations. The title "Pane Amaro"
comes from a popular Neapolitan song of the early 1900s about the
emigrant's pain at being separated from home and family. For
Kurien and Norelli, the theme is a universal one.

"The film is about the immigrant experience in general, not just
the Italian," Kurien said.